


Sanguis

by SpookyTanuki



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Grey Wardens, The Calling, The Taint, a lil angst, some fairly graphic descriptions of blood, wardens wardening you know how it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 10:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5963821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookyTanuki/pseuds/SpookyTanuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s dying. It’s a curious thought. A monster swims through her blood, yet another enemy without the courtesy to fight her, and the only thing that will save her lies thick and dark at the bottom of a cup turned slick and burning with the lifeblood of two men who may have been friends, given the chance. It makes her sick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sanguis

Something inside her is singing.

The cup is heavy in her hands, burdened with the weight of Jory’s blood upon the flagstones, with Daveth’s eyes turned white and unseeing and burning into her from the crumpled heap of flesh and purpled veins beneath that exists where he used to be. There is _shemlen_ blood dripping unseen down her hands where they rest against the grey of the chalice and, for once, she takes no gladness in it.

Tamlen is gone. Merrill is gone. Ashalle, Marethari, the clan and everything she has ever known is gone, whisked away by the same thing she even now can feel pulsing violently through her veins, pounding in her ears like war drums.

She’s dying. It’s a curious thought. A monster swims through her blood, yet another enemy without the courtesy to fight her, and the only thing that will save her lies thick and dark at the bottom of a cup turned slick and burning with the lifeblood of two men who may have been friends, given the chance. It makes her sick. Then again, sickness has been her constant companion since the moment Tamlen reached one well-meaning hand towards shadowed glass and condemned them both.

Her eyes flick from the deep morass lying stagnant in the depths of the Joining Chalice to Jory, still dripping onto the stone. To Daveth, mouth twisted in a permanent scowl that brings to mind nothing of the laughing man she had briefly known. To Alistair, a fidgety mess of shuffling feet and wringing hands. And finally to Duncan, who meets her gaze with a patient nonchalance that makes her seethe. Two men are dead. They are _shems_ and they are dead and she doesn’t know why she _cares_ so fucking much but she does and Creators help her it is setting her blood aflame with something other than the blight-beast beneath her skin and still the man who stole her stands impassive.

As he must be, she muses through the crimson tint of anger. As _she_ must be, she supposes someone will tell her somewhere down the line. Bullshit. She won’t be. She can’t. The laugh that breaks free of her, manic and feral and filled to bursting with a rage she can’t express, is as much an expression of pain as it is a pair of middle fingers raised proudly to the stupid _shemlen_ that caused this, that started the Blights and dragged her kicking and screaming out of her life and into this nightmare. She’ll wear their armor and take up their weapons and battle their demons for them, if that’s what it takes, but she won’t be one of them. Her frame is too slight, eyes too large, ears too angular to ever walk among them as an equal.

She tips her head back and downs the contents of the cup in one swift motion, fighting back bile as the filth within slides acidic down her throat. 

And then the fire starts.

The taint inside her has been insistent and uncomfortable, but it is nothing compared to this. It cuts a swath through her body, a blaze that starts in the pit of her stomach and radiates out until every inch of her is consumed. Something slides sharp and thick and nauseating through her veins like frozen thorns and she remembers Tamlen, a round faced child with tear stained cheeks and a foot full of frost-covered nettles. When he turns to her his skin is waxy, stretched taut over the bones beneath. Something black and pungent with rot drips from his hollow, cloudy eyes and she thinks she might be screaming, wherever her body’s gone, but she can’t be sure.

She has no way of knowing how long it is before she comes back to herself. Her entire body aches as if it has torn itself apart only to haphazardly knit itself back together. She’s barely lucid as Alistair helps her to her feet but she thinks she hears him call her ‘lucky.’

She doesn’t feel lucky. Not when Duncan drapes the chain of her Oath around her neck, not when the Ogre falls, not when the signal is lit and Loghain quits the field like a rotten _shem_ bastard. 

She feels cursed. There’s something dark and primal and _wrong_ coursing through her veins. She wonders if Falon’din still comes to greet his Elvhen Wardens when they die. Is she worthy of his guidance with her blood thrumming with the sins of ancient _shemlen_? She can only hope. 

She doesn’t know if hope is enough.

  


*

  


Her blood sings.

Not the way it once did. Not with the life-beat of the earth beneath her feet or the thrum of the hunt in her chest or the sigh of the wind filling the sails of the aravels. Now it sings different songs. Old songs. Songs unfit for mortal ears. Songs unheard that beat erratic in her veins and wail of the deep dark beneath the earth, the dripping dank, delirious, hungry, wanting and waiting.

She feels it like a living thing crawling fetid through her veins, nesting in gangrenous tissue that may have once been called a heart. It settles putrid in her guts, leaves her nauseous but yearning, beckoning like a demon wearing an old friend’s face. It's too faint to follow now, but one day, they tell her, it will lead her into depths that do not know the sun.

Wounds run red between grasping fingers and she hates them for the lie. The truth is black and viscous and oozing, weeping ichor and rot through the breaks in her skin, staining every bit of her until there’s nothing left but ruin and decay to fill a stagnant mold in the crude approximation of an elf. Her ears ring, pierced by the sharpness of it, an ethereal dissonance only she can hear that cuts like a blade and leaks unseen down over her face, staining the blue ink of her _vallaslin_ sickly black, burning beneath her skin like the needles fresh pressed to her yearning, adolescent flesh. It's thick and glacial as it moves through her veins and all the while it sings and sings and sings.

Leliana sings most nights, fingers moving effortlessly over the strings of a salvaged lute, and she closes her eyes, strains her ears, and listens. She feels it in her chest, lets it radiate out until the itch in her bones fades and, for a few, blessed moments, is forgotten. She finds herself transported to nights from a lifetime passed spent circled around a fire, the aravels casting shadows like solid walls in the darkness to keep the monsters out, the _hahren_ spinning tales to restless children to make them feel strong in a world that demands they be small. These songs are stories, too. Stories of heroes and villains and good versus evil and lady loves with silken skin and eyes like starlight.

“One day, they will write songs about you,” Leliana says, and she scoffs even as warmth floods her chest. 

“Well, I hopes you does it, then,” she jokes, “or else they’ll be gettin’ it all wrong. Anyone else might try to make me out like some sorta hero.”

She’s too _wrong_ inside to be a hero, the song in her bones off key, notes sour and dripping with the taint in her blood, but she can’t help but hold on to an almost fanatical hope. She may not be a hero, but maybe, in the cosmic scheme of things, the attempt will count for something. She wonders if the lady love is a requirement. She wonders if it’s wrong to hope so.

  


*

  


The song is louder now.

It is a constant reverberation in the back of her skull, droning and maddening and refusing to be ignored. It calls her towards the shadows under the mountains, towards those unending caverns she hates above all else. This is all wrong. It’s much too early. She knows this, but she can’t deny what she hears. It doesn’t matter. Let it call all it wants. She won’t answer. Not now. Not when she is so _close_.

The selfless thing to do, of course, would be to heed the call. To journey into the deep and die a hero in the dark. But she is tired of playing hero and tired of being selfless and just this once she will allow herself a bit of selfishness. Success in her endeavor will hardly only benefit herself, but she will gladly admit that her motivations are personal. They are personal and they are far away, miles east of here, over and past the Hunterhorns and across the weathered plains of Orlais, dwelling in an old fortress she’s never seen and helping to save the world all over again.

The lands of the West are wild and uncharted, but so is she. She does not fear them. She tells herself this everyday, a constant mantra to drown out the incessant wailing of her blood as it rushes through her ears. _I’m not afraid. I’m not._ Perhaps by the end of her journey it will be true.

  


*

  


There’s a roaring in her ears that cuts like claws in her flesh.

She holds the key to every hope she has left in trembling hands and allows the wall she constructed all those long years ago to hold back her tears to crumble.

She knows what she has to do. There is a life waiting for her in that lonely fortress beyond the Hunterhorns and she will have it or she will die reaching for it. There is a good chance she won’t survive this, but there was just as good a chance she wouldn’t survive the Joining in the first place. In contrast, there is no chance whatsoever that she will survive what comes if she doesn’t move forward. All things considered, she likes the odds.

The Joining was painful. The Separation is agony. Every cell of her body is saturated with the blight, and the rejection is violent and rapid and all at once. The beast in her blood is not easily displaced. Its claws dig deep, gouging out her insides as it is dragged out of her. She retches into the space between her knees and can hardly summon up the energy to be alarmed at the viscous black viscera that spatters the dirt beneath her. Something thick and warm drips languidly from her eyes, her nose, her ears. It oozes through her pores and she ponders, with a sick sort of humor, how _embarrassing_ it would be to die this way, coated in blighted ooze in a puddle of her own sick. Undignified. Leliana would scold her for making such a mess.

That thought keeps her focused. It would be easy to give in and slip away in the midst of this, but she can’t, and, more importantly, she won’t. It feels like hours before it’s over, though whether it was hours or days or minutes she can’t begin to know. She is left exhausted and trembling but very much alive. 

The silence is deafening. She finds herself oddly bereft. After so long with the preternatural melody as a constant companion it is painful to be without. There’s an empty space in her head that leaves her dizzy and disoriented, an echo chamber humming with the last remnants of a memory of the old song. The pounding of her blood beneath her skin, fresh and renewed and blessedly unblighted, is alien to her. She feels like a stranger in her own body.

It will pass, she hopes. Hope has gotten her this far, and perhaps, if she is truly as lucky as Alistair suggested all those years ago, it will pull her through one last time.

  


*

  


The world around her is silent.

She is clean, the body wrapped around her own warm, the breath tickling her temple soothing.

Beloved.

She rolls over to bury her head against that familiar neck, breathing in the scent of Andraste’s Grace that always clings to her. This is exactly as she remembers. Even if eleven or so years can tear the world apart and shove it back together again, there are some things time can’t change. Hands drift warm and reverent over her back, revisiting the old scars, memorizing the new. She allows herself the luxury of reveling in this newfound sense of permanence. She won’t leave her alone, never again, not for anything. For her, she can be selfish.

“You could have written to tell me you were coming, you know,” Leliana chides gently.

She chuckles under her breath. “Well ‘scuse me, your highness. Turns out there ain’t no courier service in the arse end of nowhere.”

She doesn’t need to see the eye roll to know it’s there. “You couldn’t locate a single courier in the weeks you were travelling through Orlais?” 

“Ain’t a whole lot o’ Orlesians what’s willin’ to run messages for some Fereldan ‘rabbit,’” she replies with a one armed shrug. “Color me shocked.”

Leliana simply pulls her closer, an unvoiced promise clear in the motion. _I will make things better_. _For you._ A promise that from anyone else would only make her scoff. A promise that from her she believes. 

She allows her eyes to close. She is tired. She is so tired. She is also reasonably certain that this is, in fact, the most comfortable mattress in Thedas, and entirely certain that it is currently occupied by the most beautiful woman in Thedas, and that makes for a rather lethal combination. The hand stroking lazily up and down her spine has her fighting to stay awake, and she is suddenly struck by the realization that, for the first time in years, when she wakes she’ll have nowhere else to be.

There is singing as she falls asleep, somewhere far away. Not the singing she’s accustomed to; that is gone, the silence left behind gradually shifting from uneasy to something like peaceful as the days pass. No, this is the song of steel on steel in the practice yards, the melody of laughter filtering up from the tavern, the music of people caught in the celebration of living. 

She’s lived a decade and more stretched and distorted to fit into a tune composed for someone else. Now it’s finally time to write her own. She doesn’t quite know where to begin, but she can at least sleep for now, secure in the knowledge that she won’t have to do it alone.

Her songs are stories, too. Stories of fear and pain. Of hope and joy. Of a lady love with silken skin and eyes like starlight.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is the first fic i've ever worked the nerve up to post HOO BOY
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @ nightingales-thighs


End file.
